Inpainting to search for premerger massive black hole binaries in realistic LISA datasets
Abstract
A key science target of the Large Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is to carry out multi-messenger observations of massive black hole binaries, observing the merger simultaneously in gravitational waves and with electromagnetic observatories. Identifying that a merger is happening and providing an updating estimate of the sky location in the hours, days and weeks before the merger is critical to enable electromagnetic observations of the merger event. In this work we demonstrate and compare two methods for premerger identification of massive black hole binaries; a zero-latency filter approach and, for the first time, an approach using an ``inpainting'' technique. We apply these methods to the LISA Data Challenge dataset 2a--Sangria-HM--and demonstrate the successful recovery of the 14 signals in the dataset that we expected to be identifiable at least half a day before merger. We show that the inpainting method can identify premerger signals even when gaps are present in the data, demonstrating the recovery of a signal even when 3 day-long data gaps are added to the 14 days preceding merger. Finally, we explore the challenge of overlapping signals, using a region of overlapping signals in the Sangria-HM dataset, all of which merge within a 10-day window, and show how removing signals that have been confidently identified from the data allows us to identify quieter signals in the same period.
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BibTeX
@misc{davies2026inpainting,
title = {{Inpainting to search for premerger massive black hole binaries in realistic LISA datasets}},
author = {Gareth Cabourn Davies and Ian Harry},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.13738},
eprint = {2605.13738},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13738},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Inpainting to search for premerger massive black hole binaries in realistic LISA datasets
AU - Gareth Cabourn Davies
AU - Ian Harry
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/09
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.13738
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13738
AB - A key science target of the Large Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is to carry out multi-messenger observations of massive black hole binaries, observing the merger simultaneously in gravitational waves and with electromagnetic observatories. Identifying that a merger is happening and providing an updating estimate of the sky location in the hours, days and weeks before the merger is critical to enable electromagnetic observations of the merger event. In this work we demonstrate and compare two methods for premerger identification of massive black hole binaries; a zero-latency filter approach and, for the first time, an approach using an ``inpainting'' technique. We apply these methods to the LISA Data Challenge dataset 2a--Sangria-HM--and demonstrate the successful recovery of the 14 signals in the dataset that we expected to be identifiable at least half a day before merger. We show that the inpainting method can identify premerger signals even when gaps are present in the data, demonstrating the recovery of a signal even when 3 day-long data gaps are added to the 14 days preceding merger. Finally, we explore the challenge of overlapping signals, using a region of overlapping signals in the Sangria-HM dataset, all of which merge within a 10-day window, and show how removing signals that have been confidently identified from the data allows us to identify quieter signals in the same period.
ER -